can anyone tell me how i go about reformatting my hard drive and putting windows xp on it (i have the pro version)...ive heard you can boot straight from the cd in DOS mode without need for a boot disk.

your correct, press del when you turn on your pc. You should be in the bios, you need to change the first boot device your cdrom drive . It will be stright foward from there, the win xp cd can format the HD.

go into your bios m8 and change 1st boot up device to cdrom then restart put cd in drive 1st though press f8 on boot up and should go into xp setup i know this as just had to do it on mine hope this helps m8

At Start-up entered the Bios by pressing a special key combination (DEL, ESC, CTRL-ESC, or CTRL-ALT-ESC)

In the Bios Set First Boot device to CD-Rom

Insert your Windows XP CD Save and Exit the Bios, the system will now boot of the Windows XP CD-Rom and reboot. Your computer should automatically detect the CD, and a message "Press any key to boot CD" will be displayed. Press SPACE bar to continue.

The installer will copy the preliminary setup files to your computer. After
this completes you'll be ready to start directing the install process.

You will be asked if you want to perform a new installation, repair an
existing installation, or quit. In this case, you will be performing a new install.

Press key to perform a new installation.

You will be prompted to read and accept the End User License
Agreement. Press F8 to continue.

Next, you will be prompted to choose a partition to install to.

You will have the opportunity to create and/or delete partitions or just allocate the available disk space to one partition.

Choose delete partitions and create one partition

Choose to format the partition to either FAT32 or NTFS. You'll also see two additional choices to perform a quick format of each option, but we recommend doing a full format of either option instead. After you've determined which option is right for you, press the correct key to format the partition.

The format process will take awhile.

When the Format process is completed, then Setup will begin. ***Note

If you are clean, installing using an XP Upgrade CD you will be asked for a qualifying product at this point.

Just pop the CD for your older version of Windows into the drive while the XP setup completes an authenticity check. Following this you will be prompted for the XP CD and setup will continue.

After Setup is complete, the computer will restart.

Leave the XP CD in the drive but this time DO NOT press any key when the message it "Press any key to boot CD" is displayed In 5 seconds setup will continue.